Brand Awareness, Importance of brand awareness

Brand Awareness is pretty easy to define in abstract, but it is less easy to attain. It is a key consideration in Consumer Behavior and Advertising strategy. Brand awareness refers to the extent to which customers are able to recall or recognize a brand. The consumer’s ability to recognize a brand is central to purchasing decision-making. Awareness does not necessarily mean that the consumer must be able to recall a specific brand name, but he or she must be able to recall enough distinguishing features for purchasing to proceed. For instance, if a consumer asks her friend to buy her some gum in a “blue pack”, the friend would be expected to know which gum to buy, even though neither friend can recall the precise brand name at the time.

Importance of Brand Awareness

Brand awareness is related to the functions of brand identities in consumers’ memory and can be reflected by how well the consumers can identify the brand under various conditions. Brand awareness is also central to understanding the consumer purchase decision process. Strong brand awareness can be a predictor of brand success. It is an important measure of brand strength or brand equity and is also involved in customer satisfaction, brand loyalty and the customer’s brand relationships.

Brand awareness is a key indicator of a brand’s market performance. Every year advertisers invest substantial sums of money attempting to improve a brand’s overall awareness levels. Many marketers regularly monitor brand awareness levels, and if they fall below a predetermined threshold, the advertising and promotional effort is intensified until awareness returns to the desired level. Setting brand awareness goals/ objectives is a key decision in marketing planning and strategy development.

Aaker, 1991a argued that, in order to build a brand and maintain brand equity, brand awareness is one of four major brand assets that add value to the product, service or its customers. Investments in brand awareness can lead to sustainable competitive advantages, thus, leading to long-term value.

Types of Brand Awareness

Different types of brand awareness can be identified:

Brand recall (also known as unaided recall or spontaneous recall): refers to the ability of the consumers to correctly elicit a brand name from memory.

Brand recognition(also known as aided recall): refers to the ability of the consumers to correctly differentiate the brand when they come into contact with it. This does not necessarily require that the consumers identify the brand name. Instead, it means that consumers can recognize the brand when presented with it at the point of sale or after viewing its visual packaging.

Top-of-Mind Awareness: Top-of-mind awareness is defined as “the first brand that comes to mind when a customer is asked an unprompted question about a category. At the market level, however, top-of-mind awareness is more often defined as the “most remembered” or “most recalled” brand names.

A brand that enjoys top-of-mind awareness will generally be considered as a genuine purchase option, provided that the consumer is favourably disposed to the brand name. Top-of-mind awareness is relevant when consumers make a quick choice between competing brands such as for low-involvement, impulse type purchases.

Brand recall indicates a relatively strong link between a category and a brand while brand recognition indicates a weaker link. When prompted by a product category, most consumers can only recall a small set of brands, typically around 3-5 brand names (although heavy users or enthusiasts may recall more brand names). However, most consumers can recognize a larger set of brands, when prompted. Clearly brand awareness is closely related to the concepts of the evoked set (defined as the set of brands that a consumer can elicit from memory when contemplating a purchase) and the consideration set (defined as the “small set of brands which a consumer pays close attention to when making a purchase decision”. After searching for information about a category, consumers may become aware of a large number of brands which collectively are known as the awareness set. However, consumers need to be favorably disposed to brands before they will be considered as realistic purchase options.


"Copyright Disclaimer Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for "fair use" for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing. Non-profit, educational or personal use tips the balance in favor of fair use."